OUR NEW CAR

Over the past 4 weeks we went testing driving 10 different cars. We spoke with good and not good sales people. We also did a ton of research. Dodge, Honda, Mazada, Subaru, Toyota, Nissan...and the winner is...

The Subaru Forester! (The color of our car is dark gray)

I am going to miss my Honda Civic (Sir Ferdinand) when sI sell it (as soon as possible). It has been a great car over the past 10 years!

Zachary Walks (well, sort of)

My Nephew, Zachary Swenson, just turned 9 months old yesterday. He has been working really hard on crawling and he will get it eventually. In the meantime, Zachary's main mode of transportation is rolling! He is great in any direction. He would not move his legs if you held his hands or under his arms...well that is until a couple weeks ago. We were in California for my sisters wedding (pictures to be posted soon) and found the proper motivation for Zachary...A SWIMMING POOL! Here is the video we took:

Birthday's Celebrated

We celebrate a lot of Birthdays in the Swenson family during the Month of August. We got together this month and had one big celebration. We had a ton of fun making rainbow cake. They were extremely colorful...just look at the pictures. It was Caley's 1st Birthday and she had a lot of fun with her first cake.

Birthday List:
Kim Mueller 8/4
Dad (Claron Swenson)8/7
Caley Swenson 8/8
Casandra Tucci 8/13
Aaron Swenson 8/17

Birthday

Today we are gathering as a family to celebrate birthdays. Now not having experience with this matter until most recently in my life, it has always been something that I have never known how to react to. My family life when I was a child was rather poor to say the least, I did not have my first birthday cake until I was 25 years old. This will be a time of remembering where we celebrate the passing of a year. A year filled with growth and change. Never have I been made more aware of that then at this time. The year has been filled with many firsts for me and it leaves me with a bittersweet moment or two in realizing that time waits for no one. There have been bad times that have come with the good, but the good far out weigh the bad ones. When I took time to look back, I have realized that there is one that remains the same. No matter the time and place I am never truly alone any more. There is not a greater blessing (or curse, depending on your point of view) then family. I truly had thought that I had lost that chance to find that meaning in my life. Thank you. At the end of every day I realize just how truly blessed to be with the ones that love me. I would never have known the joy of what a rainbow cake is or can be. Thank you.

Garden Update

It has been a little over a month since we planted our garden. I just looked at the picture I posted then and the plants sure were small. We are glad to report that all three varieties of tomatoes are growing. I was worried about the cherry tomatoes for a while but they finally decided to join the crowd. We are having some problems with the cucumbers...they are dying at the base but after the first 3 inches they look great and have lots of blooms. The zuccini and squash are getting bigger but we don't have any veggies yet. Then there are the pumpkin and cantalope that spreading slowly but surely.

Hopefully we will be eating some tomatoes in the next few weeks. Until then we will head to the Farmer's Market.

Movie Night!

The 1st Movie Night at the Moore house was a success! Tristan and I have a large living room/dining room area in our apartment with large white walls. We rearranged all the furniture so we could utilize all the space. We borrowed a projector and hooked it to the DVD player and Surround Sound. Most our my family was able to come over to watch Cars (we found out that night that 4 people had never seen it before! It's a classic!). We created our own home theater with a 10 ft movie screen.
Movie night #2 will be planned soon.

Kim & Andreas' Utah Reception

On August 16th, 2008 my sister, Kimberly Swenson will marry Andreas Mueller. The wedding will take place in California where Kim has lived for the past 12 years (I am not sure how long Andreas has lived there). They decided to have a pre-wedding reception in Utah on July 26th. The whole family pitched in as we got ready for this event. A huge thank goes out to Aunt Carol and Uncle Lynn Williams for helping get the reception site (and get the water turned off). Thank you to everyone else who came to move tables, blow up balloons & decorate in general. It was a great night. I have put the photos on the Kodak Gallery.

Deer Valley Music Festival

On July 19th Tristan & I went to the Deer Valley Music Festival. The 1812 Overture was being performed by the Utah Symphony, along with a variety of other composition. We heard classics by Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, John Williams, Leroy Anderson and arrangements of Billy Joel and Elvis classics. It's a great place to bring a lawn chair (legs can only be 9 inches high), dinner and listen to some great music. We even saw a few friends while at the concert: Matt & Tricia Sederberg and Alisa Gardner (I am sure that Jono was there also I just did not see him).

Moore Misadventure:

We decided to make a weekend of it and booked a condo. We arrrived on Friday night around 6pm and the desk was already closed, but we knew it would be. We pulled our key out of the safe and went to our assigned room only to discover the temp was 90+ degrees. It was so hot! We thought they just forgot to turn on the AC. As we looked around the condo for the on switch we found two fans and figured out that this was our AC. We could not believe! We did not last long in room although we had to stay for the night. Around 1AM it started to cool down. We were able to switch to a condo with AC for our second night. It made all the difference!